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Krish Thiagarajan Sharman Named to Endowed Chair in Renewable Energy at UMass Amherst College of Engineering

Krish Thiagarajan Sharman Named to Endowed Chair in Renewable Energy at UMass Amherst College of Engineering

Krish Thiagarajan Sharman

Krish Thiagarajan Sharman, an expert on marine renewable energy and energy producing offshore structures, has been appointed to the Endowed Chair in Renewable Energy in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the UMass Amherst College of Engineering. The chair was established in 2014 with $2.5 million in funding from the state Department of Energy Resources (DOER) to attract a preeminent scholar in the field to provide leadership in positioning both the university and the Commonwealth to take advantage of opportunities in emerging areas of renewable energy. Thiagarajan Sharman will collaborate with DOER staff on renewable energy research and projects. (Renewablesnaps.com, 7/24/18; News Office release)

Professor Thiagarajan Sharman is a Fellow of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers and leads the Ocean and Marine Engineering Group at UMass Amherst. In that context, he studies: marine renewable energy, including wind, wave, tidal, and thermal energy conversion; hydrodynamics and fluid-structure interaction; marine and offshore platform design; aquaculture engineering; and experimental and computational fluid dynamics.

Thiagarajan Sharman’s studies focus on harvesting energy from waves in marine environments. His expertise will broaden and strengthen the research program in renewable energy at UMass Amherst, which has long been a national leader in wind energy. He has published over 125 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and conference proceedings.

Thiagarajan Sharman came to UMass Amherst last spring after serving six years as the Presidential Chair in Energy at the University of Maine, where his research attracted more than $22 million in funding. At Maine, he also led the Marine Ocean and Offshore Research (MOOR) Group, which studied how human-made structures interact with the complex ocean environment. MOOR’s focus spanned offshore wind and wave energy systems, coastal infrastructure, and naval architecture.

From 1997 to 2011, Thiagarajan Sharman taught at the University of Western Australia in Perth, where he was on the faculty of the Centre for Oil and Gas Engineering, which became a school in 2003.

He was a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore in 2011 and at the University of Michigan in 2005, a visiting associate professor at the University of Houston in 2001, and a lecturer at the Australian Maritime College in Tasmania in 1995-97.

Thiagarajan Sharman was the guest editor on a special issue on “Offshore Wind Energy” for the Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering in 2013. He was also the technical co-chair for the World Maritime Technology Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2015. Additionally, he has served as the chair of the Ocean Offshore and Arctic Engineering Division for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the coordinator of the Ocean Renewable Energy Symposium at the International Conference on Ocean Offshore & Arctic Engineering.

Thiagarajan Sharman completed his bachelor’s degree in naval architecture at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras in 1986. He earned a master’s in ocean engineering at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1989 before pursuing further graduate studies at the University of Michigan, where he was awarded master’s degrees in mechanical engineering and naval architecture and marine engineering, both in 1992, and a Ph.D. in naval architecture and marine engineering in 1993. He was a research fellow in marine hydrodynamics at the University of Michigan in 1993-95. (August 2018)